Reddit reviews Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945
We found 4 Reddit comments about Between Silk and Cyanide: A Codemaker's War, 1941-1945. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
In the interest of trying to recommend books you may not have read, I am suggesting some that may seem far afield from books like HPMOR. But I have read each of them multiple times and loved them, and all of them gave me a lot to think about.
I just created a comment for Chapter 85 recommending Between Silk and Cyanide by Leo Marks. It is non-fiction, a painfully honest autobiography, and not very similar except for the bits about Knut Haukelid, but it is an amazing book. The author was the head of codes for SOE during WWII and so the book is about cryptography and secrets. And courage. I'm reading it for the third time right now.
Tuf Voyaging is a collection of short stories by George R. R. Martin (no one named Stark is in it), about Haviland Tuf, a misanthropic cat-loving merchant who starts with his humble ship "Cornucopia of Excellent Goods at Low Prices" and ends up with terrifying power and some hard decisions to make about how to use it. I'd call it comedy because it is hilarious, but it is also brilliantly-written horror.
Memoirs Found in a Bathtub is a tiny surreal book by Stanislaw Lem, about a journal uncovered by a post-apolcalyptic civilization. The main character has no name, and is apparently a spy on a mission so secret even he doesn't know about it. It is nightmarish, has absolutely no rationality to it at all, is clever and unlike any other book I've read, and most people haven't heard of it.
The Control of Nature by John McPhee is another non-fiction book. I recommend it for the beauty of the language, the depth of the research, and the fact that it is incredibly fascinating and impossible to put down. McPhee makes every person he meets into someone you want to know, and his science has substance without ever losing that sense of wonder.
There's a good memoir about the Allied spies dropped into occupied Europe during the war: Between Silk & Cyanide, written by the guy charged with figuring out a secure cryptological system whereby the agents could communicate with Britain from behind enemy lines. A great read.
You might also be interested in r/history's recommended reading list (on their side bar).
Between Silk and Cyanide, memoir of a British codemaker during the 2nd World War